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Counting the cost of not having children

We all know the cost of having children, but what is lost when, either by choice or by circumstance, kids don't come into our lives? Photo: Lyn Osborn

How much it costs to raise a kid is a hoary old news staple. Every six months a new "study" is released with numbers that would make even the Rineharts and Murdochs shiver and reflexively clutch their wallets.

The subtext is this: Who really wants to slave in an office cubicle 50 hours a week to pay for slovenly, ungrateful creatures whose volume level is set at 11 and whine more than a 10-year-old Alfa Romeo?

Is having children, therefore, a purely selfish construct? If it's about money, then it must be to create someone to care for you when you're in your golden years, ravaged by Parkinsons or Alzheimer's? And yet it can't be. Nursing homes are filled with neglected parents staring at empty walls.

This year's report comes from AMP, an Australian insurer. The 33rd AMP NATSEM report, Cost of Kids, claims that the average middle-income family will throttle over $800,000 to raise two kids, up from $537,000 in 2007. That's a 50 per cent rise in the last seven years when household incomes over the same period grew by only a quarter. Add a high-end private school to the tab (25 gees a year over 12 years per kid) and it tips well over a million. Three kids? Who can even let their mind wander into such fiscally terrifying territory!

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Imagine what you could do with a million bucks over a dozen years. Every year, you travel with your partner to the most exotic and difficult-to-reach locations. Petting gorillas in Rwanda. Yacht hopping at St Barths. Never sleeping in Colombia. The world is an oyster you're gradually prising apart.

You like cars? How about we visit the Porsche dealership and test drive the latest Cayenne. Isn't it ironic that we could fit kids in here!

An apartment in the city and a house a few hours north as a weekender. Yeah, we can have that too. We can also throw away jobs on a whim and swing abroad for that fabulous offer in Hong Kong or Los Angeles. Without children, life is the breeziest. Yoga at night, dates with pals, all-nighters, movies and cultural events.

The most financially secure people I know, and knew as a kid, were the childless. But were they the happiest? Well, that's a loaded question.

What is happiness? Ask the couple who're carting a two year old around a shopping centre or trying to eat in a restaurant while their uncomfortable, tired kid screams, about happiness?

Or the husband whose wife is so self-conscious about the scars of childbirth she recoils from any kind of loving touch; who can count using the lease-cycles of their rented semi the amount of times they've had sex.

When your kid comes home from school with bruises from the schoolyard bully, how does that make you feel? It isn't happiness. Or the parents who've lost a kid? Happiness?

But what all these reports fail to cover is the cost of not having children. We all know the cost of having children, but what is lost when, either by choice or by circumstance, kids don't come into our lives?

"I keep reading all these surveys," a friend of mine said the other day, "and the one thing they don't tell is, what happens to all this alleged money? I used to blow 300 bucks on long, boozy weekend lunches and on holidays, now I spend 12 and eat it on the beach with my kid. I'm having a way better time now than before when I was watching drunk people talk at each other."

So what are the costs of not having children? Do we miss that deeper realisation of the brevity of life? And without kids to slow us down, are we missing the minutiae of a flower just bloomed or a small lizard slithering up a wall?

I can think of a million things: seeing a freshly-scrubbed kid asleep in bed, fine hair combed back across their face, soft toy in their paw; singing in the car and replacing every oo-sounding word in the song with "poo"; the look on their face when you're standing on the other side of the school gate; Christmas morning; the first time you rip the training wheels off his bike; excited eyes that fill a dive mask when they see their first big fish.

I've got three kids and my bill is going to top over a million by the time I'm done. Do I think I could've allocated my precious earnings in a better way?

34 comments

Thanks for that Derek. I have three boys and I can add oen to your list of wonders...watching my kids learning a musical instrument and playing better than I ever could...wouldn't miss it!

Commenter

bat069

Location

Perth

Date and time

March 27, 2014, 1:26PM

yea sure my kids are learning the recorder at school real great sound...lol...but i still love them trying to play

Commenter

skeptic

Location

perth

Date and time

March 28, 2014, 8:17AM

Numerous studies regularly state that childless couples are happier than those with children.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/childless-couples-happier-kids-study_n_4589368.html

Commenter

damienf

Date and time

March 27, 2014, 1:34PM

Numerous studies may say that but nothing beats having children and then grandchildren.

Commenter

Catherine

Date and time

March 27, 2014, 2:50PM

Catherine: the plural of anecdote is not data.

Commenter

Lee eel

Date and time

March 27, 2014, 3:38PM

Numerous studies? No links or names of studies? Nothing beats having children? Darling no study would make such a claim.

Commenter

brenda

Date and time

March 27, 2014, 7:15PM

I have provided a link to an article discussing a study conducted by Open University in the UK. It is the Author of this article basing his claims on a survey of One - himself.

Commenter

damienf

Date and time

March 27, 2014, 8:08PM

You're honestly going to tell me that your happiness is 'better', more meaningful, than mine, because you have children and I don't? That I don't appreciate small moments, or know how to slow down, because I haven't experienced the wonder of birth?

Tell that to those who would love children, but can't have them. tell them that their lives mean less, and that they will never be truly happy, because of something that's outside their control. Me? I genuinely don't want kids. I'm not selfish or lacking, and you're a moron if you think my life means any less than yours because of it.

Commenter

BB

Date and time

March 27, 2014, 2:41PM

It's a club and it's human nature to try to make people feel left out, don't fall for it.

Most people I know with kids these days are always tired and sick and have little quality of life.

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